SnapBird Helps You Track Down Old Tweets

SnapBird is a service that gives you more flexibility to search individual timelines of specific Twitter users.

Twitter's built-in search features work well if you're looking for something someone posted recently, or if you're curious about what people are saying on a specific topic. But if you're looking for a link that someone you follow posted a few weeks ago, you're out of luck. That's where SnapBird comes in.

SnapBird is a service that gives you more flexibility to search individual timelines of specific Twitter users or your own Twitter stream to find links or messages that the built-in Twitter search would never find on its own.

SnapBird won't search Twitter's public timeline like the built-in Twitter search will, but it does search your tweets or a specific user's tweets for the search term you're looking for. You can specify whether SnapBird searches your timeline, someone else's timeline (as long as it is public,) your mentions or someone else's mentions, and any user's favorites. You also have the ability to authenticate and search your own timeline if it's private, or search your direct messages.

The biggest benefit to using SnapBird is that it can search back farther than 10 days, which is the message age limit for Twitter's built-in search. This means that if you remember something that one of your followers linked you two months ago, SnapBird has a good chance of finding it. Additionally, if they sent that link to you as a direct message, SnapBird can find that as well. Twitter's built-in search wouldn't be able to find the item if either of those were true.

SnapBird also allows you to search other people's timelines, perfect for those situations where you remember seeing a news article or blog post by someone you read but you don't want to scroll back through hundreds of their tweets to find out what it was. The service is free to use, and if you want to search anything that requires authentication, SnapBird will authenticate via Twitter to find it. Back to top